Google Chrome suddenly using lot of CPU & memory after update

[Wrichik Basu]

I just updated Chrome, and suddenly, my laptop's memory and CPU usage peaked. All 16 GB of memory was used up, and all CPUs were showing 100% usage. Everything came down to normal as soon as I closed Chrome.

Here is a screenshot, taken some time after this peak usage:

This is on Ubuntu 20.04, Chrome version 91.0.4472.114 (Official Build) (64-bit).

Has anyone else faced this?

 

[jedishrfu]

Try turning off any extensions you have per this article from 2020:

https://www.drivereasy.com/knowledge/chrome-high-cpu-usage-solved/

and this one about a chrome.exe virus:

https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/60223994/constant-high-cpu-usage?hl=en

 

[Wrichik Basu]

Try turning off any extensions you have per this article from 2020:

https://www.drivereasy.com/knowledge/chrome-high-cpu-usage-solved/

and this one about a chrome.exe virus:

https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/60223994/constant-high-cpu-usage?hl=en

This is definitely not due to any extensions. And on Linux, .exe viruses can't do anything.

It seems that there is some problem with the latest stable release of Chrome.

I downloaded and installed the beta release, and it is working fine. It was difficult to port all the open tabs, and after a lot of searching, TabCloud did the trick.

I am going to stick to the beta release for now. If the stable release is fixed, I will shift back.

 

[jedishrfu]

While its true .exes don't exist on linux, its still possible for an executable to creep in there somehow and worth investigating bia a virus malware check.

 

[russ_watters]

I just updated Chrome, and suddenly, my laptop's memory and CPU usage peaked. All 16 GB of memory was used up, and all CPUs were showing 100% usage. Everything came down to normal as soon as I closed Chrome.

Here is a screenshot, taken some time after this peak usage:

Has anyone else faced this?

How much time did you let it run? What website(s) were loaded? It's possible it was still doing *something* related to the update or was on a bad website/using a bad extension/plugin.

...but yeah, it could be a bug of some sort in that version of Chrome.

 

[Keith_McClary]

There was an issue with an improved video compression scheme that took much CPU to decompress. That bugged me for months:
https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify

 

[256bits]

I find that Chrome, Bing ( which uses the Google search engine ) all use up to 500 to 700 Mb of memory when they start up. Depends on the site being accessed by the way.
And op system . Win7 used to load up the internet search engine way faster than Win 8.

 

[Wrichik Basu]

How much time did you let it run? What website(s) were loaded? It's possible it was still doing *something* related to the update or was on a bad website/using a bad extension/plugin.

The sequence of events was something like this: I updated Chrome (along with many other programs) using apt. Then Chrome informed me I have to relaunch it for the update to take place. As soon as I closed and relaunched, all of my CPUs were flooded, and memory was completely used up, so much so that everything on my PC froze. It stayed like that for 10 minutes before I could finally get some RAM and opened System Monitor, and killed Chrome. Thereafter, every time I opened Chrome, the same problem.

Overall, maybe it would have run for 20 minutes total. Regarding the websites, I had PF open, and some others from where I was studying. But none of them were working as the PC froze.

 

[MikeeMiracle]

Try opening the browser without loading any pages and see if it continues. High resource usage for browsers is normally the result of web pages being loaded.

 

[anorlunda]

@Wrichik Basu , are you certain that you were not tricked into downloading a contaminated Chrome imitator? It would be a smart strategy for malware distributors to make sites imitating popular downloads. If they were good, they might even be able to hijack the official URL for Chrome downloads.

 

[Wrichik Basu]

@Wrichik Basu , are you certain that you were not tricked into downloading a contaminated Chrome imitator? It would be a smart strategy for malware distributors to make sites imitating popular downloads. If they were good, they might even be able to hijack the official URL for Chrome downloads.

I downloaded via the official PPA using sudo apt install google-chrome-stable. The PPA listed is https://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main. I always update via apt only, so I believe I have a legit version.

 

[Wrichik Basu]

I also made a short screen video that shows how much memory chrome was using up. As you can see, there is one single process that uses around ~2 GB RAM, and there are many other processes from chrome which eat up RAM in small amounts.

 

[Wrichik Basu]

Try opening the browser without loading any pages and see if it continues. High resource usage for browsers is normally the result of web pages being loaded.

At the moment, I have 42 tabs open. Out of them, around 30 are under different groups, and I open them only occasionally. But Chrome can easily work with these many tabs. In fact, when I imported the tabs from the stable to the beta version using TabCloud browser extension, the beta version loaded all of those tabs simultaneously. But nothing ever crashed; everything went on smoothly. I could see only 10% CPU usage total.

 

[MikeeMiracle]

So it's one of your tabs that consuming memory, unfortunately I am not aware of any method of finding which one it is, you just going to have to try closing them 1 by 1 while monitoring to see which it is.

 

[russ_watters]

Yeah, this sort of thing happens. The only way to be sure a particular page/tab isn't causing the problem is to close it and see what happens.

 

[Wrichik Basu]

So it's one of your tabs that consuming memory, unfortunately I am not aware of any method of finding which one it is, you just going to have to try closing them 1 by 1 while monitoring to see which it is.

I doubt that is the case. As I said, when I imported the tabs into the beta version, all of them were loaded simultaneously before I sorted them into groups, but everything was still smooth.

Some time back, I opened the stable version and just kept going from one webpage to another. No crash. Seems the problem was temporary; it sorted itself out.

 

[anorlunda]

Did you search for complaints by others about the same problem?

If the problem happens just for you and not for others with the same Chrome version, then we are not likely to be able to give you the answer.

 

[Wrichik Basu]

Did you search for complaints by others about the same problem?

If the problem happens just for you and not for others with the same Chrome version, then we are not likely to be able to give you the answer.

Yes, I searched, but thought probably I am the first to report it...

 

[dlgoff]

The sequence of events was something like this: I updated Chrome (along with many other programs) using apt. Then Chrome informed me I have to relaunch it for the update to take place. As soon as I closed and relaunched, all of my CPUs were flooded, and memory was completely used up, so much so that everything on my PC froze.

Same for me. I then promptly went back to a restore point.

 

[Wrichik Basu]

Same for me. I then promptly went back to a restore point.

Probably there wasn't a need to restore your PC. Just killing the processes spawned by Chrome from task manager would have freed up the memory. Plus, you always have Ctrl + Alt + Delete in Windows, or Alt + Sysrq + REISUB in Ubuntu.

 

[dlgoff]

Probably there wasn't a need to restore your PC. Just killing the processes spawned by Chrome

Which process? When looking at the task manager, there were probably a dozen Chrome processes.

 

[Wrichik Basu]

Which process? When looking at the task manager, there were probably a dozen Chrome processes.

Start with the one consuming the most memory/CPU. Then proceed to the others.

 

[dlgoff]

Start with the one consuming the most memory/CPU. Then proceed to the others.

The one consuming the most CPU memory when closed, closed Chrome.

 

[armed]

After opening five or above webpages, its going crazy like 100% disk space usage and have to stop everything!

 

[Wrichik Basu]

After opening five or above webpages, its going crazy like 100% disk space usage and have to stop everything!

Hmm, that means I am not alone.

 

[pbuk]

sudo apt install firefox
sudo apt purge google-chrome-stable

 

[Wrichik Basu]

sudo apt install firefox
sudo apt purge google-chrome-stable

Often not possible because some things work better from Chrome rather than Firefox. First is syncing everything with Google, including passwords, bookmarks and history. On my Android phone, I don't have much space, so I use Chrome, which came pre-installed. Using Chrome on both PC and phone helps as everything is synced. Google also sends an alert if any password is compromised by keeping an eye on the dark web, which is helpful. Second, sites like Google Play Console (for Android app developers) work better with Chrome.

 

[f todd baker]

I had an unrelated problem with chrome a few months ago which I could find no solution to. I installed firefox and found it to take less space and to be quicker in general. Syncing all settings, bookmarks, etc from chrome to firefox was trivial and quick.

 

[Wrichik Basu]

Syncing all settings, bookmarks, etc from chrome to firefox was trivial and quick.

But can Firefox sync to my Google account? That's what I require.

 

[f todd baker]

I guess I don't really understand why you need that. Would you keep Chrome around even if it were not your default browser? I guess when I think of syncing I think of a given app on different computers always has the same stuff in it on all machines. It is a shame when google/chrome has you by the *** so you cannot change browsers.